Brunswick, which already has quite a collection of boating brands under it's belt, is set to buy Lowrance.

 

https://www.bassresource.com/bass_fishing_123/brunswick-lowrance-62621.html

"METTAWA, Ill. June 24, 2021 – Brunswick Corporation (NYSE: BC) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Navico, a global leader in marine electronics and sensors for $1.05 billion. As a result of this acquisition, Brunswick will add the industry leading brands of Lowrance, Simrad, B&G, and C-MAP to its Advanced Systems Group (ASG)"

 

Lets see if this helps or hurts...

Thanks for posting this.  It's very interesting and doesn't surprise me.  We're moving to a world where trolling motors and fish finders are integrated.   It makes sense that Motorguide and Lowrance be under the same umbrella.  They both need each other.  The $1.05 billion price is a surprise to me.  Since Navico is a private company there's no way to know what their sales are or how profitable they are.  I've always assumed they were much smaller than Johnson Outdoors and Garmin and therefore struggling to compete against them.  Johnson Outdoors has a current market cap of $1.2 billion and Humminbird is just a portion of that.  So Humminbird is clearly the smallest player in the market now.

I wonder how this will shake out.  Low came out with their own trolling motor distancing themselves from MG.  I wonder if that could be a factor in the purchase?  Do you suppose in the future that boats rigged with Mercury motors will come with Lowrance units.

It will be interesting to see what happens now that Motorguide and Lowrance are under the same roof. 
 

The multi species guys love the Xi5, so maybe they’ll keep with that and Lowrance will be geared towards bass fishing? 

So will next year's transducer be called the 7-10 Splitshot?

On 6/27/2021 at 1:01 AM, Koz said:

So will next year's transducer be called the 7-10 Splitshot?

"Navico, which had revenue of $470 million in the trailing 12-month period ended May 31"

 

- from marketwatch.com

 

I haven't found a breakdown of which Navico unit generates the most money. I would guess Simrad Yachting, but it could be Lowrance. For all I know they sell a lot of those $10,000 B&G Helm units.

Maybe Lowrance can learn about programming Contour Tracking into the Ghost software rather than having to set a pile of waypoints up for trolling.

Brunswick is a good customer of ours